Bloomberg's Shift of Homeless to Hotels Alarms Some Neighborhoods

From Richmond Nelson's porch, the building across the street looks like just another hotel in a strip of five imposing hotels north of Kennedy International Airport, a place where you might find globetrotters resting for the night. The sign near the roof still says ''Best Western.''

But the travelers Mr. Nelson has seen arriving at the hotel since July have been more than 1,000 homeless people -- mothers and their children and a few fathers. They are ferried to his neighborhood after being evicted by their landlords or asked to leave by relatives weary of the crowding.

The city's homeless population has mushroomed by 13 percent since July 1 to 8,900 families -- the highest on record -- and forced the Bloomberg administration to take controversial measures like housing families in a vacant Bronx jail.

But since taking over City Hall in January, the administration has also quietly set up 18 new shelters, some virtually overnight, for more than 1,200 families, usually by paying nonprofit social service providers $93 a night per room to place them in whatever failing or marginal hotels the providers could find. The total number of family shelters is now 124.

In response, there have been protests from neighbors and their political leaders across the city, in Fort Greene and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, South Ozone Park and East Elmhurst in Queens and Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. While some of the grievances have been of the not-in-my-backyard variety, the residents have also complained that the shelters were opened with no notice and little chance to have their voices heard.

Helen Marshall, the Queens borough president, learned of plans to convert the Best Western two weeks before it opened ''through the community grapevine,'' never officially, said a spokesman, Daniel Andrews. And the first public hearing was not held until 11 days after the shelter's opening. A city councilman from Brooklyn, James E. Davis, recently introduced a bill requiring the agency for the homeless to give local public officials 60 days' notice before building or acquiring a shelter.

And homeowners like Mr. Nelson and other residents near the new shelters say their quiet streets have been ruffled by annoying incivilities. Homeowners opposite a former Best Western -- with more than 300 rooms, now the city's largest shelter -- say they have seen residents or their visitors drop beer bottles and fast-food cartons on their lawns, urinate behind their trees, have sex in cars alongside their sidewalks and play basketball in their backyards.

''The quality of life has just plummeted because the nature of a lot of the people that came in helps it go down,'' said Mr. Nelson, a 68-year-old retired high school teacher. ''They don't have an inkling of our lifestyle here.'' There have also been complaints from area businesses. Marc Leffman, the general manager of the 386-room Radisson next door to the Best Western, said his hotel had lost contracts worth $750,000 for rooms for flight crews. ''What I worry about is perception,'' he said. ''And the perception is that if your neighbor is a homeless shelter, it's a haven for prostitutes and drug addicts and people who would pick your pockets.''

City officials said court orders -- including one barring them from using the Bronx jail -- had given them no choice but to patch together the best accommodations that they could, and quickly. They blamed the upsurge in homeless families on rising unemployment and a tight housing market.

Linda I. Gibbs, the commissioner of homeless services, said that there would always be a ''tremendous amount of community anxiety'' and ''transitional issues'' when a shelter was introduced but that the department's experience was that neighbors eventually became supportive of the shelter residents. She acknowledged that little notice had been given to the neighborhoods affected, but she said she could not afford to provide ''months of notice, with families awaiting shelter.''

''We do not go in in the dark of night,'' she said. ''We are responding to the demand we are experiencing, and we do not have the lxuury of providing long periods of notice.''

Given a shortage of housing that can be paid for through federal subsidies, residents will probably stay at the shelter for an average of 11 months, officials said.

Some of the homeless mothers, like Cynthia Reed, said the neighborhood complaints were being blown out of proportion. Ms. Reed, a 45-year-old mother of two, was evicted from a $1,025-a-month apartment in East New York after she lost her job as a health aide.

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''Some of these people don't realize they could be one paycheck away from being homeless,'' Ms. Reed said. ''They look at us as being nobody because we're homeless.''

The homeowners facing the Best Western, on 135th Avenue near the Van Wyck Expressway, sometimes sound like the white homeowners who decades ago resisted the arrival of minority families. ''We see something like this decreasing our property values,'' said Leroy Reid, a retired Police Department property specialist who has lived in his clapboard house for 36 years and raised two daughters there.

But most of the protesting homeowners are black, and several say most of the shelters were put in largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Ruth Bryant, president of a community organization, Southeast Queens Concerned Neighbors, said city officials seemed to think ''the community won't make as much noise as some other communities, like Bayside and Forest Hills, which are not predominantly black.''

Mr. Nelson said he learned about the move from a security guard at the Radisson. ''It was kind of sprung on us,'' he said.

Responding to allegations that minority neighborhoods had been made targets for the shelters, James Anderson, a spokesman for the homeless agency, said, ''We've opened facilities where facilities have become available.''

In South Ozone Park, the conversion of the Best Western into what is now called Carlton House was done at the initiation of its owner, a partnership called JFK Acquisition Group. It filed for bankruptcy in November 2001, partly as a result of the decline in air travel after the terrorist attacks, and then, to help pay off creditors, it asked the Salvation Army if it would be interested in taking over the hotel. The Salvation Army is now negotiating a $71 million contract to manage Carlton House for another four years and nine months.

The organization has imposed an 11 p.m. curfew and posted two security guards at the 135th Avenue gate to make sure that only residents enter the hotel. Alfred Peck, the Salvation Army's director of social services for families and adults, said one security guard was dismissed for fraternizing with a resident outside the hotel. He suggested that the homeowners' complaints exaggerated problems, saying in five nights of sitting with security guards that the worst thing he had seen was someone parked in a homeowner's driveway.

Residents at Carlton House, who spend much of their days inside their rooms watching big-bellied jets lumber into the sky, said the rules made them feel as if they were confined to a prison.

''I've never committed a crime, but I feel like a criminal,'' said one mother of two, who asked that her name not be used. ''They call you by your room number instead of by your name.''

Nearby homeowners said they had worked hard to raise children in houses that now sell for more than $200,000 and they did not want to struggle with unruly behavior. Mr. Reid's wife, who asked that her full name not be published, took pains to say, ''We have nothing against these people, for there but the grace of God it could be us.''

But she added: ''We figured we'd retire, we'd lay back and enjoy ourselves. Now we're reluctant to leave our house.''